Small Concert Promoters Come Out Swinging At Live Nation Hearing

In their opening statements, small concert promoters, Jerry
Mickelson, chairman of JAM productions, and Seth Hurwitz,
co-owner of IMP Productions, brought in to represent opponents to
the merger, expressed vituperative outrage at a merger that they
believed would increase the dominance of Live Nation and
Ticketmaster.

Calling the merger "vertical integration on steroids," Mickelson
said that the combination would consolidate power between two of
the most powerful businesses in entertainment, and Live Nation
and Ticketmaster would "use their combined market dominance to
monopolize the entire music industry," eliminating competition in
terms of venue management companies, record labels, ticket
sellers and concert promoters. In fact, he later charged that the
combination would be far worse than the monopoly-like nature of
Clear Channel in 2000, when it owned the concert promotion
business it later spun off as Live Nation to avoid antitrust
charges.

Hurwitz, meanwhile, seethingly described how Live Nation became
the monolith it is today, and agreed that a combination with
Ticketmaster would enable the concert promoter to dominate the
industry before getting to his biggest point of concern: that the
merger would indirectly force smaller concert promoters who sell
tickets through Ticketmaster to share all of their ticket sales
information with one of their biggest competitors in Live Nation.

Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino later insisted that there should
be a firewall between the concert promotion and ticketing
division in their combined company, agreeing that it's not fair
for Live Nation to have access to such info.

That was really the only news from the event, which began with
Live Nation and Ticketmaster trying to explain their rationale
for merging (It's the economy, stupid!) and quickly devolved into
a discussion of Ticketmaster's arrangement with TicketsNow that
directed Bruce Springsteen ticketbuyers to the ticket-reseller's
Web site, which isn't really relevant considering that
Ticketmaster agreed to stop linking its customers to
TicketsNow.

Chuck Schumer grilled Ticketmaster CEO Irving Azoff on how much
money Ticketmaster made from tickets bought for the Springsteen
show through TicketsNow, which he didn't know on the spot,
understandably, and why he would've bought such a company, even
though Azoff wasn't CEO of Ticketmaster when that deal was done.

In fact, we actually felt kind of bad for Irving Azoff. Even
though he's technically the CEO of Ticketmaster, he's not a CEO,
he's a manager who was placed in the CEO position when his
artist-management company, Front Line, acquired Ticketmaster, and
he won't be CEO of the combined Live Nation and Ticketmaster.

There was also quite a bit of discussion about whether the merger
will raise or lower ticket prices and whether the merger would
put smaller concert promoters out of business. We'll let you
guess who came down on which side of those issues.